Simply Saucer Re-Revisited: Our Own Velvet Underground
Wednesday April 09, 2008 @ 04:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By James Tennant

For those who haven't heard the stories, Hamilton's Simply Saucer were a band well ahead of their time. Their influences are well-known to the common hipster, but still unknown to most everyone else: Kraut-rock, The Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett, Pink Fairies, The Stooges, Sun Ra and so on into '60s and '70s obscurities. Saucer swirled them all together in a sneering, aggressive proto-punk/psych package complete with blips and bloops a la Hawkwind. In Hamilton, Ontario in the '70s they did find fans — but not a lot of peers.

Simply Saucer - December 2006 (Photo By Stephanie Bell • Emerging)

"There were bands, but they were mainly cover bands," vocalist/guitarist Edgar Breau recalls. "There weren't a lot of original bands that I knew of. We were pretty hostile, to be honest — hostile towards what was going on in town at the time. Now I regret that attitude because you realize that in the musical community you've got to support one another. But back then it was different."

Hamilton was a different place indeed, and Saucer were a different band. Their first performance was in a church basement where they did an hour-long paean to noise entitled... well... "Noise." Before you start to think that Hamilton was simply too unsophisticated for Saucer (we're looking at you, Toronto hipsters), know that Saucer shopped demos to all the Canadian major labels, only to be turned down. No one understood... until 10 years later. That's when some old studio and live recordings (recorded by brothers Daniel and Bob Lanois) were be pressed onto vinyl. That album, Cyborgs Revisited, became a collectors' item. Word spread across the rock underground. The album was praised by the likes of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Julian Cope. Finally, in 2003, Sonic Unyon gave Cyborgs Revisited a proper CD release. The album gets frequent mentions whenever Chart does its sporadic Top Canadian Albums Of All-Time polls.

Half Human Half Live features all-new studio material — though the term "all-new" isn't entirely correct. The recordings are new, but the songs are old — written by Breau back in the heyday of Simply Saucer, but never before etched onto disc (though fans may recognize a few of the tracks from the Cyborgs Revisited "bonus" material). Songs such as "Almost Ready Betty" capture the focused frenzy of Breau and the band, while elsewhere there are long, psych-inspired jams, patented Saucer-style instrumentals, and even an acoustic track, "Dandelion Kingdom," on which they break out the stand-up bass, banjo and brushes.

Recording "Dandelion Kingdom" reminded Breau of the band's early days. He calls himself "somewhat of a taskmaster" and remembers one occasion where he had asked the band to rehearse on Christmas Day. He may no longer be quite that demanding, but he still insists on working through until the job is done.

Simply Saucer circa 1978

"They kept saying to me 'Look you've got to take a break,'" Breau recalls. "I insisted, saying 'We're going to nail this,' so we just kept going. I was just determined to do it. I think it was on the 12th take that we nailed it."

The other half of Half Human is the part that's half live. It was recorded before a select crowd at Catherine North Studios in Hamilton, and shows that the new Saucer still have chops.

"I felt it was important to show that we could still play those songs," Breau admits. "That's one of the reasons we did the live stuff, and there's just so much material we could do. I see this album as a transitional record, from the old to the new, and I'm kind of wrapping up by doing these songs."

Unknown band finds critical acclaim decades after they dissolve, reforms after almost 30 years... To the casual observer, it's a pretty tall tale. Imagine what it's like for Breau, who spent years making the music. It was appreciated by a handful of forward-thinking music geeks, but few others. Breau and the band knew they were on to something, but they never would have believed they could be mentioned in the same breath as bands from New York City and London.

"It's a mentality you have because you're from here," says Breau. "You're thinking 'We are not them, they are great, the Pink Fairies, The Velvet Underground... but we're in Hamilton.' But we were one of them — just without knowing it."